Presently, many countries in the world adopts both the metric and the British systems for the measurement of length, therefore, the plastic tape measures people are using mainly combines meters of the metric unit and feet of the British system, i.e., meters are printed on one side and feet are printed on the other side.
There are several main problems to be solved for tape measures made of plastic, plastic reinforced with fiberglass or sackcloth etc.
There's another difficult problem to be solved: the large measurements on the tape numbers cannot be printed mechanically. Said large numbers means numbers printed on the tape indicating whole numbers like 1 m, 2 m . . . 30 m . . . and 1 ft, 2 ft . . . 100 ft . . . . In comparison with large numbers, we call repeatedly appearing graduation and text indicating centimeters or inches within every meter or inch the small numbers.
Traditional tape printers of tape measure can only print small numbers and cannot print large numbers. Limited by the diameter of the form roller, in general, rollers for small numbers in a meter can only adopt 1 m as the perimeter, while rollers for small numbers in a foot often adopt the perimeter of 3 feet, i.e., 0.9144 m so as to be close to that of the rollers for small numbers in meters. Both sides are printed at the same time, the numbers in the meter side will repeat every meter, and that in the foot side will repeat every 3 feet (actually 3 independent but end-to-end feet). Then, how can large numbers in the unit of meter or foot are printed? For example, for a 30-meter-long tape measure, 1 m, 2 m, 3 m . . . 29 m, 30 m shall be printed on the meter side and 1 ft, 2 ft, 3 ft . . . 99 ft, 100 ft shall also be printed on the foot side. The traditional method is: after printing all small numbers of both sides by machine, and then print the large numbers by screen printing or other means one by one.
This is a very troublesome process, which not only needs to be done manually, but also has the disadvantages of slow printing speed, great labor intensity, covering large space, high rate of defective products and unstable quality. The method to print the large numbers by silk-screen printing or other means one by one has been followed all over the world since the first tape measure appeared.